No one ever told me about this when I was diagnosed.

[chlote]

Hi there, I'm new here. Looking for support like everyone else. I am 29 years old, female, and have been diagnosed with ADD since I was four years old. This is also the year I started taking a low dosage of Adderall and continued on and off until I was about 15 years old. I am in grad school and now taking Vyvanse, which works great! I'm glad to have found something that works for me.

I noticed, through years of therapy, that I have some major codependency issues. I also became aware of hyper fixation being a symptom of having ADD/ADHD. I wonder if these two are related to one another? Or could it be a result of rejection sensitivity? I feel like they can absolutely overlap. I really do wish that I had some acknowledgement of my ADD symptoms and how it affects me while I was in therapy.

Can hyper-fixation manifest as codependency with people who have ADD? Any information helps.

[Gettingittogether]

The truth is ADHD affects everything and not positively. And yes, the condition has terrible effect on our ability to manage friendships. Along with all the symptoms of lack of focus and attention, there is also the inability to (in the words of psychologists) self-regulate. Part of struggle with focus is to screen out unimportant information and to focus on the important information.

Relationships are all about being able to integrate feelings and impressions and linear thinking and so on. You have to be able to identify your feelings (harder than it seems) and integrate all the intellectual stuff you know. At some point it dawned on me that through significant periods of my life, I didn't recognize when women were interested in me and instead I went after women who were not interested in me.

The difference between how people act around us when they're romantically interested (or curious) and not is huge, staggering ... and yet subtle and easy to miss if you're not tuned into your body and vocal tone and all the small things that indicate interest. (How closely people stand to you for example is part of interest.) Literally I learned how to distinguish these after I got diagnosed as an adult, through therapy I might add. And then there is this: I had trouble figuring out when I was really interested in someone vs. in my head the person checked off some boxes. How nutty is that? Well again, if ADHD is making it hard to identify, label and integrate feelings and emotions (strong feelings and emotions) then it's no so surprising. Choosing good partners requires running a checklist and paying attention to gut feelings and emotions and reactions. BTW: the term for this is dysregulation. Or google ADHD and emotional self-regulation/dysregulation.

Add in that ADHD folks have high rates of depression and anxiety (not necessarily caused by ADHD) and yes, all kinds of relationship problems can result, including codependency.

I'm glad Vyvanse is working. I would recommend you get to a therapist who is great with relationships. Yeah, I had codependent tendencies too. Literally my former therapist sometimes had to give me scripts to say and specific directions to help me interact with people better. Note: I was highly popular and likeable. But I didn't know how to really pay attention or figure out when I wanted to get to know someone better or what to do when I felt that way.

The key is you have to find a fantastic therapist. Someone merely good, sometimes even very good, isn't enough. You have to find someone who is REALLY good, excellent, and you can make progress in relationships.

[chlote in reply to Gettingittogether]

Thank you so much for this! All of this completely makes sense and I had never really thought of this before. I had partners who would literally send me into dysregulation regularly because they couldn't handle my energy. Then I would feel bad for making them feel bad and I was sad that they were sad, and the cycle goes on. Something I heard from a therapist not too long ago was that I couldn't distinguish between people liking me for me and people liking me for the way I made them feel about themselves. So I can kind of understand your experience of not being sure when you were genuinely interested in someone.

I'll be looking for a therapist who specializes in ADHD/ADD. I appreciate the advice!

[Gettingittogether in reply to chlote]

Just my view: you don't need a therapist who specializes in ADHD. There are very few who do so. You just need to someone really good!-- who you deeply connect with. As in you look forward to seeing them and you walk away from sessions with insights and guidance that blows you away.

Any therapist who deals with relationships and self-regulation .... since self regulation and anxiety and all that are part of ADHD ... will end up helping with this symptom of ADHD. Lots of people have emotional self-regulation problems without having ADHD.

My former therapist quit his ADHD focus literally weeks before I arrived. And yet, he was fantastic for my ADHD. Part of his framework was that even saying ADHD was too broad. You want to be super specific in how you understand your mind and then work with your mind/brain.

My anxiety plunged as I worked with this guy. Plunged. I didn't know I had an anxiety problem until it began to disappear. But that anxiety was creating panic at every life problem, every relationship problem, and that panic made it hard to regulate and think and soothe myself and so on. And being kind to ourselves when we run into an ADHD problem is half, if not more, of the solution.

[MemphisAdhd1988]

Thank you both for sharing. It is crazy to continually read about people that are dealing with the same issues. Please read my story to know more about me.